Top Tories’ Rwanda links raise questions over its selection as UK asylum partner
The new Illegal Immigration Minister in charge of the Government’s deal with Rwanda has a connection to the East African country that goes back more than a decade, i can reveal.
The news has led to renewed questions about why Rwanda – a country that the UK Supreme Court and Foreign Office have both declared unsuitable due to safety and human rights concerns – was selected by Tory ministers as the UK’s asylum “partner”.
A former Tory minister told i they wanted answers about whether the links the Conservatives had established with Rwanda had “influenced the governmental relationships that ministers have”.
“It’s a legitimate proprietary and ethics question whether or not it influences people’s dealings and conduct with Rwanda,” they said.
Priti Patel, home secretary when the Rwanda asylum partnership began, told i the choice of country was not affected by pre-existing Tory links.
Mr Tomlinson is among the senior Tories who gave lessons to Rwandan lawyers as part of a Conservative Party volunteering scheme supported by Paul Kagame’s government.
He travelled to Kigali in 2009 with the same programme that Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, and Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, had joined a year before, i can reveal.
The future MPs were all lawyers at the time of their visits as part of the Tories’ Project Umubano which included work “to strengthen” Rwanda’s main legal training centre and work with its Ministry of Justice.
Organiser Andrew Mitchell, who founded the project while he was the shadow international development secretary, wrote in a 2008 article that topics covered included the “English legal system and international treaties”.
Mr Tomlinson’s new job includes overseeing the delivery of the Rwanda deal through a highly contested new bill and treaty, following Mr Jenrick’s resignation.
He has not referred publicly to his previous visit to the country since his appointment, but previously wrote on his website: “I have been involved with the Conservatives Party’s Project Umubano … I was a member of the Justice Team in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. In Rwanda the team helped to advise those in the emerging Rwandan legal profession.”
A volunteer who joined the same 2009 trip as Mr Tomlinson told i this week that Project Umubano was “all sanitised by the Rwandan government” and did not present a true picture of the country.
“There was a really weird undercurrent, I felt like it wasn’t quite right – you could feel this was a country that wasn’t completely free,” they added.
Mr Mitchell, the development minister, told i Mr Tomlinson was “brilliant” on Project Umubano, adding: “He knows and understands Rwanda well.”
He is among more than 300 former and serving Tory MPs, political advisers, councillors and party members who travelled to Rwanda with the programme between 2007 and 2017.
Other attendees include David Cameron, the former prime minister and current Foreign Secretary; Chancellor Jeremy Hunt; and education ministers Damian Hinds and Robert Halfon.
Birmingham University academics who researched Project Umubano have found it created a “unique bond” among participants. Their report published in 2020 quoted one Tory MP who said their “early introduction to Rwanda” had led to a “a lifetime commitment to support its future development”.
Now the depth of the Conservative Party’s links with the Rwandan government through Project Umubano (see box) is prompting questions over whether it affected the decision to strike a migration deal with the country, which has so far received £290m from the UK in return.
Steve Smith, chief executive of the Care4Calais refugee charity said: “You have to ask whether this deep and prolonged friendship between the Conservative Party and the Rwandan Government is at the heart of them ignoring the rule of law and rewarding their friends with substantial sums of our money.”
Kagame’s support for Tories’ Project Umubano
Rwanda’s President Kagame has vocally supported Project Umubano and joined several of its events.
The two-week trip Mr Tomlinson joined saw some delegates personally visit the leader at his official residence, with Mr Mitchell writing at the time: “President Kagame is very generous about our work.”
Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer
His office’s official account of a 2011 meeting with Mr Mitchell in Rwanda said: “President Kagame urged the volunteers of Umubano Project to share the knowledge of Rwanda they have gained through this project.”
The Rwandan president’s office quoted Mr Mitchell as saying: “We discussed today the very close cooperation between Rwanda and Britain which is growing from strength to strength.”
Mr Mitchell has previously been questioned over his relationship with the Rwandan government, and was grilled by MPs in 2012 after allowing £16m of aid that had been frozen over Rwanda’s alleged funding of rebels killing and raping civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mr Mitchell denied then having “personal interest” in maintaining good relations with President Kagame, after their meetings through Project Umubano, saying he had stopped taking part in trips personally in 2010.
His successor as international development secretary, Justine Greening, had also been on Project Umubano and described it as “an extremely worthwhile project”.
At the time of Mr Tomlinson’s 2009 Rwanda trip, Human Rights Watch’s annual report warned of “increasing government restrictions on political space and individual freedoms, growing intolerance of criticism of state policies, and a refusal to allow any discussion of ethnicity, leading to concerns of heightened repression”, as well as “fears of intimidation and violence” in the upcoming 2010 presidential election.
President Kagame was victorious with 93 per cent of the recorded vote, following the murder of opposition figures and a journalist, political arrests and a crackdown on the free press.
Asked whether the political climate was discussed by Project Umubano’s organisers or participants, the volunteer who went with Mr Tomlinson told i: “From memory it was as if that element was just ignored.
“It was like ‘focus on the task in hand, helping a country that has got poverty and social issues’. I don’t think I realised how corrupt Rwanda was and at the time there was a sense of ‘we can make it work’.”
The volunteer said “a lot” of the people who joined the trip were now either Conservative politicians or aides, adding: “People went out there wanting to become parliamentary candidates and a lot of them did get propelled onto the list.”
Documents presented to the High Court last year showed that the Foreign Office repeatedly ruled Rwanda out of a list of potential countries being considered by the UK for third-country asylum processing in 2021 on “political and legal grounds”.
Officials warned of “substantial issues in relation to asylum systems and human rights”, “very high fraud risk”, politically-driven “torture, killings, and kidnap”, and said that asylum seekers previously sent to Rwanda by Israel “were not given the right to settle and were at risk of” being sent back to their home countries.
But Rwanda was added back onto the list of countries under consideration in June 2021, after a note from a senior civil servant saying a “particular interest in Rwanda” was held by the then prime minister and home secretary – then Boris Johnson and Priti Patel.
Government documents show that negotiations opened with the Rwandan government shortly afterwards, despite the country not having gone through the same assessment process as other potential partners.
Ms Patel told i she had not been on Project Umubano, and said that links forged through it had not influenced the choice of Rwanda for the ‘Migration and Economic Development Partnership’.
She said she had not been advised by Conservative colleagues who had been part of the scheme, and that she did not hold a “particular interest” in Rwanda herself.
Mr Tomlinson, Ms Braverman, Mr Jenrick and the Home Office were contacted for comment.
